AI For Creating Marketing Materials

[Arantor]

It’s a good tool

I had a first hand look this week at someone using it... shall we say under less than ideal circumstances.

My work had a 'Christmas quiz' where the questions were sourced from ChatGPT. More than one of the questions managed to have the answer in the question, and one of the questions about a fictional snowman managed to confuse which particular snowman it was 'thinking' of.

I've also had to wrangle with other developers writing code using Copilot and Gemini where what they've got out of it is for much older versions of Laravel than we were using (e.g. Laravel 5.5 versions of code, on a Laravel 10 codebase) which was... frustrating.

I haven't actually seen that many cases of it being a good tool, at least on its own, but as part of a larger workflow I could possibly see that... one day.

 

[Cedric]

I had a first hand look this week at someone using it... shall we say under less than ideal circumstances.

My work had a 'Christmas quiz' where the questions were sourced from ChatGPT. More than one of the questions managed to have the answer in the question, and one of the questions about a fictional snowman managed to confuse which particular snowman it was 'thinking' of.

I've also had to wrangle with other developers writing code using Copilot and Gemini where what they've got out of it is for much older versions of Laravel than we were using (e.g. Laravel 5.5 versions of code, on a Laravel 10 codebase) which was... frustrating.

I haven't actually seen that many cases of it being a good tool, at least on its own, but as part of a larger workflow I could possibly see that... one day.

I know. If it’s too complicated it confuses itself. I’ve had a couple of times where I just started cussing it out due to frustration. It does always stay friendly though. No matter what you say to it.

 

[Arantor]

I will be honest, this is one of the things that bothers me immensely about the collective interactions: the anthropomorphisation of the thing.

It doesn't 'stay friendly', because that would imply that it understood what friendly or unfriendly meant, or indeed that it actually understood anything actually said to it, rather than digesting the words down into statistical assessments to align it with statistical outcomes.

I know it's tempting to attribute dice to being friendly or unfriendly (especially the b-----d dice that my D&D group of many years ago used to talk about) but there's nothing there behind the curtain.

 

[Tyrsson]

I beta tested CoPilot. Was not impressed then, am not impressed now.

 

[KatBookTrailers]

I’ve experimented with ChatGPT a lot, and sometimes still do. It’s a good tool but you can’t let it control you. But I agree, sometimes it’s too obvious that it’s just straight off copied. I did it too in the beginning though. Guilty as heck to that. But it takes away the genuine interaction and integrity.

On a side note, I do catch myself often using more vocabulary that chatgpt has. As Arantor said, elevate, empower, etc.

(groan)

I guess it's true that the more we read, the more words we'll use. I think teachers expected that to come from good literature and not AI LOL

I'm sure you'll come up with better words to substitute very soon. I wonder what the new word for 2025 is going to be that becomes all the rage?

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I will use AI to help me with idea generation when I'm out of ideas. That doesn't happen too much.

I use AI to build article outlines only to see if it suggests things I should consider adding to my own crafted outline.

I use Grammarly AI for editing my written work. I only do it for minor stuff. I try to keep the words I use original; otherwise, who's voice is it actually?

When AI suggests an edit due to grammar or whatever, I'll manually do it, too. That helps me get better at it rather than be lazy and press the AI button to correct it.

AI can be a great tool, but it can also dumb you down if you let it.

I can also tell what's written in AI. I can tell by looking at a person's past content versus what they have been posting lately. The choice of words and the structure of their sentencing and messaging often change.

When I detect people doing it, it's almost awkward feeling because it's so obvious.